Jonathan Storm: The noblest intentions yield drama clunker

It's been a while since Big TV has gotten involved with the very sticky business of kindhearted drama about the disabled. Surprisingly, the usually dependable Hallmark Hall of Fame gets stuck in the flypaper tomorrow at 9 p.m. on CBS3, with

Sweet Nothing in My Ear

.

God bless them for visiting the world of the deaf and trying to explain the controversy about cochlear implants, which mimic sound by transmitting electrical impulses to a radio receiver that stimulates electrodes inserted into the inner ear of a deaf person.

But the plodding and ponderous presentation does disservice to the term

drama

. The effort would have been better spent on one of those nuts-and-bolts documentaries you see on PBS. (In fact, there's a great PBS Web site all about the subject:

» READ MORE: http://tinyurl.com/6rgw69

.)

Marlee Matlin (who else?) stars as a deaf mother. Jeff Daniels is her hearing husband, and a fourth grader named Noah Valencia, plucked from the California School for the Deaf, is swell in his first acting job as their little boy, whose life may or may not be improved with implants.

In press materials, the producers present the topic as brand-new in TV drama, but for regular viewers, it's old hat.

Cold Case

went over the ground at length in an episode last month. Cochlear implants also have been fodder for

CSI: Miami

and

Law & Order

, among others.

Like the old-fashioned "disease-of-the-week" movies,

Sweet Nothing

has a doctor take the characters (and, more important, the viewers) through the material. "It's important that you both understand what implants can and cannot do," he says to a couple, who, as parents and members of the deaf community, would already know everything about the subject before they ever got to his office.

And then there is the court case, where lawyers and witnesses present the pros and cons of implants.

Boston Legal

it ain't.

Sweet Nothing

covers the tired ground of deaf identity that is very difficult for hearing people, including me, to understand. Deafness is seen not as something that needs to be "fixed," but rather as the focus of a vibrant language and minority culture that should be preserved.

For instance, my use of the word

disabled

in the first sentence of this article already will have set off alarms among many deaf readers. But do I really have to write

differently abled

? Maybe I do. Maybe it's not my right to judge people living in a world I cannot experience.

But it is my job to judge TV. The actors, especially Daniels, are great. But the dull and disappointing

Sweet Nothing in My Ear

cannot skate by on the strength of its good intentions.

TV Review

Sweet Nothing in My Ear

Tomorrow night at 9 on CBS3